In Search of a Prophet by Paul-Gordon Chandler

Author:Paul-Gordon Chandler [Chandler, Paul-Gordon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2017-06-20T04:00:00+00:00

6

The Prophet

The veil that clouds our eyes shall be lifted

by the hands that wove it,

And the clay that fills your ears shall be pierced

by the fingers that kneaded it.

And you shall see.

And you shall hear.

—Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet1

St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery in Manhattan’s East Village is the oldest site of continuous religious practice in New York. Starting in the early 1900s under the dynamic leadership of its minister, Reverend William Norman Guthrie, a close friend of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, this historic church become known for focusing on faith and the arts, hosting numerous artists, writers, poets, actors, and dancers. Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Carl Sandburg, modernist poet William Carlos Williams, dancers Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham, and the great Harry Houdini himself all performed at this imaginative church. St. Mark’s also became a beacon for those creatively pushing the boundaries of traditional Christian beliefs and exploring Eastern spirituality.

Sitting on a park bench on a scorching summer afternoon in front of this ecclesiastical icon of creativity and unorthodoxy, I couldn’t think of a more fitting place for Kahlil’s best-selling book, The Prophet, to have been launched in 1923. No wonder Kahlil spoke so appreciatively of this church, whose minister he admired. There he gave readings of his work and held an exhibition of his drawings. Reverend Guthrie first heard Kahlil read his work at a Poetry Society event in 1919 and invited him to display a collection of his drawings at the church. Flipping through a first edition copy of The Prophet that I was carrying with me, generously given to me by my sister, I noticed it was printed in 1940, albeit in the original publication format. I sat there savoring the thought that this book in my hands was remarkably its thirty-eighth print run in just seventeen years.

Mystical, spiritual, philosophical, twenty-eight poetic reflections and barely twenty thousand words in length, The Prophet, known as the “little black book,” was an unlikely bestseller whose influence rapidly spread from the streets of New York City to the world beyond. Within a month, all thirteen hundred copies of the first print run had been sold.2 St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery hosted the first public reading of The Prophet, and it was standing room only to hear it read by Butler Davenport, a well-known actor of the time. Kahlil attended this first public reading and commented afterward:

To my regret he read the whole book . . . but his spirit was ever so good. . . . I had wanted it first read in a church.3

Kahlil’s soon-to-be friend Barbara Young happened to be present at that first public reading and wrote of the experience:

[I]t was not by chance that when The Prophet was read for the first time in public, at St. Mark’s In-the-Bouwrie in New York City on an autumn afternoon in 1923, I sat in the crowded church and listened to the reading by Butler Davenport, that distinguished gentleman of the theatre. I knew only that I had heard startling and essential truth spoken with a power and a beauty that I had never heard or read anywhere up to that moment.

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